Operation Grocery Budget: January 2019 Report

We have made it to the end of January, and here's the screen shot from our budget app! We wound up under budget by $21.08, although I suppose the day isn't quite over yet. Ha!

Biggest help to me this month was this question: "Do we need this NOW?" More often than not, I realized I was buying for future need rather than immediate. It saved lots of money. I'm also noticing that instead of a jam-packed freezer and pantry, we have room to move things around and use them much more easily. Excess creates problems more than solutions. This lesson is effecting the rest of our home as well. 

I did notice some other things - 

1. We could have said no even more often than we did this month, especially that Kroger purchase last night - but to be quite honest, I didn't want to get out in the polar vortex that will be the rest of this week! So I picked up things like cereal, and cans of pantry items that are super basic but will allow me to make some of our favorite quick meals without "needing" to get creative.

Wondering about that $1.55 purchase? I chose not to say no to that purchase at ALDI. Mama needs her half and half for the winter storms and multiple snow days in a row necessitate proper caffienation. 

2. I have to decide what to do with the "excess" budget money.

I kind of vote for rolling it over - so that if I want to make a bulk purchase I can, or for those months when we run out of all the non food essentials at once...or maybe that is just our house? 

3. I still have far to much food in the house. I guess in some ways this is a good thing, and in some ways it probably means I still need to buy less. 

In fact, this whole exercise is teaching me that I am amazingly blessed with abundance - that I can be more creative than I think, and that my defaults need to be reset - instead of buying more, I can ask myself if there is a creative alternative. 

Yesterday, for example, I pulled some turkey tenderloins out of the freezer, a bag of gluten free stuffing from the pantry, and some frozen brussels sprouts and home canned green beans. It felt like thanksgiving, especially since I'd made broth the day before in the instant pot that could easily be made into gravy, but I had no potatoes for mashed potatoes that (most) of my kids love. So instead of going and buying potatoes, I grabbed a bag of diced frozen potatoes and cooked them up and what do you know, they made fluffy mashed potatoes! I probably wouldn't have tried that before. We had a nice time as a family, thanking God for all that He has done.

Operation Budget Cuts is going great so far! We will keep going until it stops working for us!